An action of routing and forwarding includes two types of fundamental content: routing and forwarding. Routing means determining an optimal path for a packet to reach a destination. Forwarding means transmitting the packet along the determined optimal path to reach the destination. In order to implement the two types of fundamental content in turn, a router collects corresponding routing information according to a certain route selection algorithm to fill in a routing table in advance. Based on the routing table in which the routing information is filled, when performing routing, the router may determine, by searching the routing table, whether an entry used to instruct how to send a packet to a next site (where the site may be a router or a host) exists in the routing table. The router normally discards the packet if the entry is not found. Otherwise, the router forwards the packet to the next site according to the corresponding entry in the routing table, so as to implement packet forwarding.
In the prior art, a minimum granularity for the router to forward a packet is a 5-tuple flow. That is, a packet including 5-tuple (where “five elements” in the 5-tuple are: a destination IP address, a destination port, a source IP address, a source port, and a protocol, separately) is used as a minimum forwarding unit, and the packet is forwarded according to a forwarding principle of “forwarding, according to a same path, packets including a same 5-tuple”.
Generally, in an application environment, such as a mobile network, especially in an application environment in which the HyperText Transfer Protocol (http), for example, http1.1, is commonly used, different http requests may also include a same 5-tuple. According to the foregoing forwarding principle used in the prior art, these different http requests including a same 5-tuple are eventually forwarded according to the same path.
At present, how to implement separate forwarding, according to different paths, of different http requests including a same 5-tuple has not been proposed in the prior art.